Shyam Selvadurai’s presentation on ‘The Art of Detail’

February 29, 2020, 5:07 pm

 Selvadurai, who is on one of his frequent visits to his home country from his adopted country - Canada - was invited to speak by the English Writers Collective (EWC) in association with the International Centre for Ethnic Studies (ICES). He obliged with a power point presentation in the ICES Auditorium; open to the public, on Saturday 22 February late afternoon. Chairperson EWC, Gnana Moonesinghe, and Co–Chairperson, Vijita Fernando, presided; Vijita having organised the event.

The necessity of adding detail

Shyam first projected an admonition on screen – "Show, don’t tell" and went on to elucidate the statement. He quoted from John Gardener’s The Art of Fiction. He said that in writing fiction the writer wants the reader "to feel what we want them to feel" and this is achieved much through detail, targeting certain effects. Thus details can be included to create selectivity, emotional and sensory reaction. He suggested that to enhance our writing, we take an abstract idea and concretize it. A simple example given was when bringing in love to our narrative it can be given the detail of ‘kissing passionately’ for greater impact. Also the plain description of ‘nasty person’ is not effective; details of nastiness must be added on. Too much detail, however, obstructs the reader and the writer must take note of this.

The craft of using detail

The use of detail is to bring characters to life; to direct the reader to form an opinion or opinions; to enhance the narrative. Characters and situations and events in a narrative must be sensual and they should be seen, heard, mentally tasted and touched. Writing is deliberate, he said. Thus as a writer, (very successful, we add) Shyam writes as thoughts come into mind, going on with the writing not stopping to edit. Then he goes through what he has written, picks out the good, rejects, deletes, changes, edits and uses techniques to re-write what he wrote freely. This rewriting is a craft and has to be practiced. We need to do it several times over. Incidentally, answering a question from the audience, he indicated he was a disciplined writer, setting times for his daily writing and not writing only when and if inspired.

Shyam listed significant details or those that matter to convey an idea or judgment or both. The active voice is better than the passive, he said. Generic details give necessary information since the story must be followed. Then there are unique details which usually pop the character to life. Mysterious details arouse not only curiosity but interest too.

Copies of part of Chapter 1 titled 1968 from Jhumpa Lahiri’s the Namesake and an extract from the short story Cinnamon Skin by American Edmund White were distributed to participants. He read paragraphs pointing out descriptions and details in them, to elucidate his emphasis on including detail when writing creatively. Lahiri is familiar. She is Nilanjana Sudeshna "Jhumpa" Lahiri, British born in 1967 and now American, known for her short stories, novels and essays in English, and, more recently, in Italian. She is married to an Italian. Her parents are Bengali from Kolkata. She has won the Pulitzer for fiction and PEN and Hemingway awards.

Edmund White is an American fiction writer plus essayist with his major topic being homosexual love and homosexuality. In his short story Cinnamon Skin, "the protagonist nostalgically recalls his queer adolescence, remembering how he abandoned himself to cloud-propelled dreams of love: melting ecstasy, heavenly embraces, ethereal intimacy."

Shyam Selvadurai

As the expression goes, Shyam needs no introduction. However, it is pertinent to include a few facts of this friendly, fine person. He was born in Colombo – 1965 - and attended Royal College. The 1983 riots affected the family and so they migrated to Canada; he was 19 then. He studied creative and professional writing as part of a Bachelor of Fine Arts programme at y. He authored Funny Boy, autobiographical fiction in 1994 and won the . His other well known novels are (1998) and Swimming in the Monsoon Sea (2005). In 2014 he edited an anthology of Sri Lankan prose and poetry in all three languages, the Sinhala and Tamil being translated to English, and titled the volume: Many Roads through Paradise: An Anthology of Sri Lankan Literature.

One noteworthy feature that has to be mentioned is that he is a successful, internationally well known author who comes back frequently to the country of his birth and helps the less privileged and those discriminated against. He conducts workshops in English and creative writing in Jaffna and the North. He curated the Fairway Galle Literary Festival in 2016 and 2017 and maybe introduced, but definitely carried out the FGLF’s outreach programme in Jaffna. He motivated the publication of short stories written by those who participated in his reconciliation workshops.

We were thus fortunate to have him make a presentation to us and express our appreciation. Questions, among those pertaining to the presentation, were about the film being made of Funny Boy. He scripted the screen play but was reluctant to say more about the forthcoming film. We know it is directed by Deepa Mehta, who seems to have a preference for adaptation of published books to film. She very successfully adapted Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Cracking India on which Mehta’s film Earth starring was based. She directed the filming of Water in Sri Lanka and the third of that trilogy was Fire. The actors in the film Funny Boy are Sri Lankan. Filming, started in January, is almost complete.